At the Medical Center of Masis, which lies in the administrative center of Ararat province, the installation of a new boiler house and the replacement of windows and doors have drastically improved wo... Show More +rking conditions for personnel and contributed to more out-patients: many people now opt for treatment in the Center rather than drive to medical facilities in the capital city of Yerevan. In addition, the Medical Center’s administration has applied to Armenia’s Renewable Resources and Energy Efficiency Fund to get funding to make an adjacent clinic more energy efficient through better insulation. Overall, it is envisaged that the Center will save more than US$100,000 over the next 20 years.Armine Martirosyan recently delivered a healthy baby boy at the Medical Center and hadn’t thought twice about using its facilities. “I was frequenting the Center during the prenatal period for my regular checkups and it was so nice and cozy, that as a future parent, I felt very safe and comfortable delivering my child here,” says Armine. Show Less -

WASHINGTON, February 18, 2015—More and better data about women and girls can shed light on all aspects of their lives, identify new ways of empowering them, and even stem forced or child marriages, ac... Show More +cording to World Bank Group and other experts.Gaps in data can result in uninformed policy decisions as well as missed opportunities to improve the lives of girls and women, and more investment in gender-disaggregated data is badly needed, experts told a panel discussion here.“Lack of formal identification disproportionately affects women and children. There are 750 million children across the world whose births are not registered,” said Mariana Dahan, Identification for Development (ID4D) coordinator at the World Bank Group (WBG). “Registering girls at birth and marriages can prevent forced marriages and help girls in inheriting property and assets.”Mayra Buvinic, senior fellow at the United Nations Foundation, said one way to expand available data is to increase sample sizes during surveys to include gender dimensions.Scant data globally reveal too little about women’s health, childbirth conditions, workplace roles, asset ownership, and access to banks and other financial services, which makes diagnosing challenges, designing programs, and benchmarking progress in tackling poverty and inequality difficult.But collecting such data poses challenges of its own. “One important aspect is the social and cultural issue of getting into households and talking to women,” WBG Senior Director for Gender Caren Grown said.A WBG 2009-2011 Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS) in Uganda, for example, required extensive interviews to successfully collect gender-specific data.“We went through many rounds, interviewing members of the family together and then also interviewing them individually to get gender-disaggregated data,” WBG Senior Economist Talip Kilic said.Filling gapsFilling these data gaps is vital to addressing extreme poverty, to which women and girls are disproportionately vulnerable.To do this, the WBG is scaling up partnerships with UN agencies and others, including the new Data2X initiative, which aims to improve data collection and use it to guide policy, leverage investments, and spur economic and social progress.It has identified 28 global gender data gaps that it is seeking to close across five domains: health, education, economic opportunities, political participation, and human security. It is also notably working with the International Labour Organization and Food and Agriculture Organization to operationalize new international definitions of work and employment that recognize all productive activities, paid and unpaid, which has major implications for how women’s work is measured.The result will inform guidance to statisticians and survey designers with the aim of more accurately measuring women’s labor. This will complement WBG work with the UN Evidence and Data for Gender Equality (EDGE) Initiative to gather data on women’s asset ownership and entrepreneurship.Along with the World Health Organization and others, the WBG has also developed plans to scale up collection of vital statistics. Marriage and divorce registrations will expand the ability of women and girls to own and inherit property, while birth and marriage registrations will help prevent early and forced marriage.The WBG is also housing a new Global Financing Facility for the Every Woman Every Child initiative, supporting countries as they institute universal registration of every pregnancy, birth, and death by 2030.Some 100 developing countries lack functioning systems to track births, deaths, and marriages. An estimated 230 million children under age 5 have never had their births registered—half of them are girls, who typically face broad legal and cultural constraints that make them far more vulnerable to poverty.Providing legal proof of identity makes it possible for males and females to obtain passports, open bank accounts, access loans, obtain drivers’ licenses, vote, go to school, or draw pensions. Show Less -

DHAKA, February 9, 2015 – The Government of Bangladesh today signed a $300 million financing agreement with the International Development Association (IDA) for the Income Support Program for the Poore... Show More +st Project. IDA is the World Bank’s concessional arm that helps the world’s poorest countries.The Project will provide cash transfers to the poorest mothers to reduce their poverty with the objective of improving their children’s nutrition and cognitive development. About 600,000 poor mothers and pregnant women will receive monthly payments through biometric-enabled Bangladesh Post Office cash cards for participating in activities aimed at the growth and development of their children.“Ensuring adequate nutrition prenatally and in the first two years of life helps to maximize a child’s intelligence and brain development and enables higher level of learning through childhood and into adulthood,” said Johannes Zutt, World Bank Country Director for Bangladesh. “The project will help poor mothers to learn how to improve the nutrition of their young children and also provide an income supplement to enable them better to act on that learning.”Despite Bangladesh’s record of reducing child mortality, the country is among the 10 countries with the highest prevalence of malnutrition. 41% of children below the age of 5 are stunted, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). The project will cover 42 of the poorest Upazilas in northern Bangladesh that lag behind in nutrition indicators and is expected to benefit 2.7 million poor people. Pregnant women and mothers of children below 5 years from extremely poor households will receive payments for regular visits for antenatal care services, child nutrition and development awareness sessions and monitoring of the child’s weight and height.“Well Design Safety nets can improve child health and nutrition outcomes, while contributing to reduction of poverty and inequality. The project is a good example of involving local government bodies as well as using technological innovation to improve service delivery in Bangladesh, " said Mohammad Mejbahuddin, Senior Secretary, Economic Relations Division, government of Bangladesh. “The Project will break the cycle that binds poor children to poor nutrition and cognitive deficiencies”.The project will also focus on strengthening local governments’ delivery of safety net programs by setting up administrative platforms at Union Parishads to identify and enroll beneficiaries and ensure timely payments. The agreement was signed by Mohammad Mejbahuddin and Johannes Zutt, on behalf of the Government of Bangladesh and the World Bank respectively at the Economic Relations Division.The credit from IDA has a 38 year term, including a 6 year grace period, and a service charge of 0.75 percent. Show Less -

Nay Pyi Taw, February 5, 2015—The Government of Myanmar today signed a new agreement with the World Bank to bring improved maternal, newborn and child healthcare to millions of mothers and their young... Show More + children.The Essential Health Services Access Project will provide US$100 million in funding for increased and improved coverage of critical health services across Myanmar’s 330 townships. The project -- initially approved by the World Bank’s Board of Executive Directors in October 2014 -- is expected to benefit more than 4 million pregnant women and young children. “We are pleased to be able to invest in quality health services for all people in Myanmar. Better health services will improve the quality of life for mothers and their young children, and, ultimately, will help bring us closer to achieving the ambitious goal of universal health coverage,” said Dr. Thein Thein Htay, Deputy Minister, Myanmar Ministry of Health.Under the project, communities will receive grants for health services at the local level and support for implementing inclusive planning, resource management, improved local oversight and community engagement. For rural health centers, the grants might allow basic health staff, like midwives, to make more frequent visits to the homes of pregnant women, infants, and young children to provide needed care, ensure timely immunizations, and to give families nutrition and hygiene education."Good maternal, newborn and child healthcare is critical for Myanmar. This project will help bring more and better essential health services to Myanmar mothers and children,” said Mr. Ulrich Zachau, World Bank Country Director for Southeast Asia.“The World Bank Group warmly welcomes Myanmar’s goal and programs to achieve universal health coverage, and we are pleased to offer our strong support for this project.”The project is supported with credit from the International Development Association (IDA), the World Bank Group’s fund for the world’s poorest countries. This support for Myanmar’s move toward universal health coverage is part of the World Bank Group’s US$2 billion multi-year development package announced by World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim during his visit to Myanmar in early 2014. The World Bank Group, in close coordination with development partners, is working with Myanmar on a new Country Partnership Framework, which will help improve agriculture, water, access to education and health, energy, and finance, as well as public financial management, private sector development, and other key development priorities. Show Less -

Uzbekistan has set itself an ambitious goal of becoming an upper middle-income country by 2030. To do so, policymakers recognize that creating good jobs and increasing productivity are crucial to this... Show More + endeavor, which in turn can be achieved through a better skilled workforce.People develop skills throughout all stages of their life – from conception to preschool, in primary and secondary school, in tertiary education, and on the job. Families, schools, and employers all impart valuable skills on individuals and help reinforce those skills during different stages of the life-cycle.One of the fundamental challenges for individuals, however, is to ensure that the skills they acquire prepare them for the numerous hurdles they may face throughout the course of a lifetime. This is particularly true when it comes to securing gainful employment and ensuring career growth.Linking education systems with the demands of the labor market and ensuring lifelong learning among skilled employees are ongoing challenges faced by nearly every country in the world.In Uzbekistan, a team of experts from the World Bank Group partnered with experts from the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ) to take a new approach to addressing these particular challenges – going beyond the traditional data on educational attainment and instead disaggregating skills to include both cognitive and non-cognitive components.The team’s latest report, The Skills Road: Skills for Employability in Uzbekistan, provides detailed recommendations for how these differentiated components of skill sets can be enhanced in order to improve the overall skills of potential employees and increase labor productivity in Uzbekistan.Research shows that the skills being produced by the education system are not keeping pace with labor market demands. If current labor force participation rates hold, Uzbekistan’s labor force is projected to increase by 3.9 million people by 2030, becoming the fifth largest labor force in emerging Europe and Central Asia (after Russia, Turkey, Ukraine, and Poland). If tapped to its full potential, a young and growing population places Uzbekistan in an ideal position to reap the full benefits of economic growth.Job quality remains a particular concern, with more than half of Uzbekistan’s workers employed in the informal sector. Too many of these workers in the informal sector carry out routine tasks and therefore, do not learn new skills on the job. Firms in the formal sector that are looking to hire skilled employees complain of significant difficulties finding skilled workers: one study found that 73 percent of firms identified inadequate skills as an obstacle to doing business.As part of the country’s continuing efforts to take advantage of its young and growing population and make better use of its human capital, policymakers in Uzbekistan are working with the World Bank Group to understand the individual skills needed to bring about better labor market outcomes and also design policies and programs designed to improve the skills made available to labor market participants.This latest report helps illuminate the critical role that skills play in labor markets and provides in-depth analyses on ways these skills can be enhanced. The report examines how actions targeting both cognitive skills - such as literacy, numeracy, and memory - and non-cognitive skills - such as extraversion, conscientiousness, openness to experience, agreeability, and emotional stability – can improve employment outcomes.“Skills is a broad term,” notes Mohamed Ihsan Ajwad, World Bank Group Senior Economist and co-author of the study – which also covers Tajikistan and the Kyrgyz Republic.“What we tried to do in this report is differentiate the impact of cognitive and non-cognitive skills on employment outcomes. These were the first large-scale jobs and skills surveys administered in the country, so we were then able to make recommendations that go beyond other works that primarily focus only on education attainment,” says Ajwad.The report presents five key policy goals to improve the skills of the current and future workforces in Uzbekistan. These goals are informed by the Skills Toward Employability and Productivity (STEP) framework, which brings together research-based evidence and practical experience from a diverse set of areas.The first of the five goals focuses on getting children off to the right start by expanding access to quality early childhood development programs, where rates of return to investment are generally very high and important soft skills are learned. The second goal looks to ensure that modern curricula are in place for students in Uzbekistan and that improvements in teaching quality are achieved. Complementing these education reforms, the report looks at implementing selective labor market programs that can boost participation among discouraged workers and women, as well as incentives for firms to provide more on-the-job training to workers.The fourth goal cited in the report is designed to encourage entrepreneurship and innovation by increasing access to quality tertiary education, while the fifth goal focuses on matching the supply of skills with employers’ demands by improving labor market information systems.Collectively, these goals are designed to help individuals develop and hone skills, not just during their education, but throughout their entire lives – from childhood to retirement. In doing so, Uzbekistan can achieve its objective of creating good jobs and increasing worker productivity, and thereby, take steps toward achieving its goal of upper-middle income status by 2030. Show Less -

Previous research on sex-selective
abortions has ignored the interactions between fertility,
birth spacing, and sex selection, despite both fertility and
birth spac... Show More +ing being important considerations for parents
when deciding on the use of sex selection. This paper
presents a novel approach that jointly estimates the
determinants of sex-selective abortions, fertility, and
birth spacing, using data on Hindu women from India's
National Family and Health Surveys. Women with eight or more
years of education in urban and rural areas are the main
users of sex-selective abortions and they also have the
lowest fertility. Predicted lifetime fertility for these
women declined 11 percent between the 1985-1994 and
1995-2006 periods, which correspond to the periods of time
before and after sex selection became illegal. Fertility is
now around replacement level. This decrease in fertility has
been accompanied by a 6 percent increase in the predicted
number of abortions during the childbearing years between
the two periods, and sex selection is increasingly used for
earlier parities. Hence, the legal steps taken to combat sex
selection have been unable to reverse its use. Women with
fewer than eight years of education have substantially
higher fertility and do not appear to use sex selection. Show Less -

Founded in 2008, the Employment Fund
Project (EF) is currently one of the largest youth training
initiatives in the country, reaching more than 15,000 youth
annuall... Show More +y. In partnership with the EFs donors,5 the
Adolescent Girls Employment Initiative (AGEI) was launched
in 2010 to expand the programs reach to an additional 4,410
Nepali young women aged 16 to 24 over a three-year period.
Each year the EF competitively contracts training and
employment service providers (T&Es), including formal
technical and vocational education and training (TVET)
institutions, public and private providers, as well as
skilled artisans. EF ensures that training courses are
market-driven by requiring that providers complete a Rapid
Market Assessment during the competitive bidding process.
The program had positive impacts on the following labor
market outcomes that are both statistically and economically
significant: employment rates; finding employment related to
the skills in which youth were trained; earnings; and the
proportion of youth earning more than 3,000 NRs (40 USD) per month. Show Less -

The 2014 Ebola Virus Disease outbreak in
West Africa is the largest to date by far. Ebola Virus
Disease causes disproportionate mortality among the
working-age popu... Show More +lation, resulting in far more mortality for
parents of young children than other health crises. This
paper combines data on the age distribution of current and
projected mortality from Ebola with the fertility
distribution of adults in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone,
to estimate the likely impact of the epidemic on the number
of orphans in these three countries. Using the latest
mortality estimates (from February 11, 2015), it is
estimated that more than 9,600 children have lost one or
both parents to Ebola Virus Disease. The absolute numbers of
orphans created by the Ebola epidemic are significant, but
represent a small fraction (1.4 percent) of the existing
orphan burden in the affected countries. Ebola is unlikely
to increase the numbers of orphans beyond extended family
networks' capacities to absorb them. Nonetheless, the
pressures of caring for increased numbers of orphans may
result in lower quality of care. These estimates should be
used to guide policy to support family networks to improve
the capacity to provide high quality care to orphans. Show Less -

The returns to investments in early
childhood development (ECD) are manifold and can include
improved school readiness, reduced drop-out rates, higher
labor force p... Show More +roductivity and greater social cohesion.
Despite these high returns, enrollment in early childhood
education is just 18 percent across Africa, with
disproportionately high enrollment from children in urban
areas and from wealthier families. Interactive Audio
Instruction (IAI) is a distance learning technology that can
deliver low-cost, culturally appropriate education via radio
or mobile audio technology. It is a highly effective tool to
reach children who can be hard to reach through conventional
programs, including the rural poor and children with
disabilities. IAI can also be an effective form of service
delivery in unstable and conflict-affected regions. Show Less -

India’s high malnutrition burden is a cause of concern at the highest levels. The country’s malnutrition rates are two to seven times higher than those in other BRICS nations, and the rate of decline ... Show More +has been far from satisfactory. The good news is that there appears to be a serious commitment and urgency to address this long-standing challenge: a national nutrition mission is being prepared and several states have initiated nutrition missions.It is therefore timely to look at the full set of factors that determine nutrition to ensure that the measures we now undertake address them comprehensively so that they have the much-needed impact.Child undernutrition is measured using three different indicators — stunting (too short for age), underweight (too little weighat for age), and wasting (too thin for height). Each indicator reflects a different facet of undernutrition: stunting reflects chronic undernutrition, underweight reflects a combination of chronic and immediate undernutrition, and wasting reflects acute undernutrition.Most often, undernutrition sets in during the first thousand days of a child’s life — from conception to two years of age. If appropriate interventions are not undertaken during this critical window of opportunity, the long-term consequences are substantial.Stunting in early life causes irreversible damage that has lifelong consequences for the child, the family and the country. It not only leads to shorter height in adulthood but also impairs brain and cognitive development, leading to poorer school performance and reduced earning potential in later life. It is estimated that stunting leads to a 4.6 cm loss of height in adolescence, a 7-month delay in schooling and 0.7 grades loss, about 10 per cent reduction in lifetime earnings, and a 2-3 loss of GDP.Stunting also increases the risk of developing chronic diseases in adulthood such as diabetes, hypertension and heart disease, reducing productivity and increasing the costs of health care. These nibble into the quality of India’s human resources and compromise the country’s efforts to boost economic growth.Since childhood stunting is one of the best predictors of future human capital, it is imperative to measure and track it, and institute measures with the potential to dramatically reduce it, if the country and its people are to realise their full economic and human potential.Contrary to the popular notion that Indian children are shorter than their counterparts elsewhere due to their genetic make-up, there is strong evidence that while genetics plays a small role, all children have the potential to grow along a similar trajectory if they are fed as recommended, given appropriate care and a hygienic environment to live in, and receive timely health care to prevent and treat infections.New analysis shows that Indian children in the critical age group of six months to two years who received feeding, health care and improved water and sanitation in adequate measure have drastically lower rates of stunting than those who received none of these adequately (23 per cent versus 52 per cent). This association is robust and holds true across both rural and urban areas and across wealth quintiles,as well asin states with poor nutrition outcomesand in districts with the poorest human development indicators.Sadly, less than two per cent of India’s children in the critical age group have all three determinants in sufficient measure, and an unacceptably large proportion of them (63 per cent) get none of them to the recommended degree. Surprisingly, even amongst the wealthiest Indians, only about seven per cent of children receive all three categories of determinants adequately.Clearly, stunting is not a problem of the poor alone. Undernutrition pervades all strata of society. Even children from middle and upper income households display stunting levels that are quite significant — about 50 and 25 per cent respectively.Therefore to make a dent on undernutrition, it is critical to ensure thathouseholds and mothersacross the country adopt appropriate child feeding practices, mothers and young children get the necessary health care they need, and all have access to safe water and sanitation.Quick and significant wins for middle and upper income populations, where access to the three determinants is not a key constraint, could be achieved through effective and sustained information campaigns that provide much needed information. To support the needs of poorer households, however, larger and more intensive efforts will be needed.These segments of the population will need the full set of interventions that begin with mothers before birth and continue through the first two years of a child’s life. Measures that ensure health and good nutrition for mothers — such as delaying the age of marriage and child birth and providing pregnant women with adequate antenatal care and dietary intake, including iron supplementation, will need to be complemented with the full set of interventions for the child. These include breastfeeding, appropriate complementary feeding practices, and the provision of micronutrients, together with timely immunisation, treatment of infections and appropriate feeding during illnesses,as well as access to safe water, sanitation and hygiene.In sum, isolated interventions will be inadequate to address a challenge of this magnitude. Fortunately, programmes to address all the critical determinants of nutrition exist and are being strengthened: the Integrated Child Development Services scheme has been restructured; a National Nutrition Mission is being developed. The National Health Mission, which seeks to deliver the full set of health interventions to pregnant women and children, is up and running; and the Swacchh Bharat Mission that seeks to make habitations ‘open defecation free’ and provide safe drinking water is underway. The synergies between these programmes must now be fully exploited.The potential to reduce stunting substantially in a few years’ time has been demonstrated. Besides countries such as Peru, Rwanda, and Nepal, India’s own state of Maharashtra stands out in this regard. Maharashtra achieved a reduction in stunting in children under two years of age from 39 per cent in 2005-06 to 23 per cent in 2012.India must now seize the opportunity nationally and ensure that every child receives its birthright — the opportunity to lead a healthy and fulfilling life that enables each to attain her full potential. Show Less -

The ‘science of delivery’, or bringing the right kinds of services effectively to the poor, is the key to eradicate extreme poverty, said Sir Fazle Hasan Abed, the founder and chairman of BRAC, the wo... Show More +rld’s largest NGO. While visiting the World Bank Bangladesh office, he shared how perfecting the science of delivery helps reduce poverty; saves lives; brings prosperity; and how one impact is linked with another.In 1972 BRAC started working on integrated rural development in Bangladesh. The country had an alarmingly low child survival rate at the time. Diarrhea was among the leading causes of the death of children. BRAC took the lead in popularizing the Oral Rehydration Therapy (ORT) to prevent diarrhea. Bangladesh now has the world’s highest ORT usage rate. Thanks to ORT and the later success in child immunization, the under-five child mortality in Bangladesh has decreased from 180 deaths per 1,000 live births in the 1980s to 53 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2011. The child survival rate in Bangladesh has surpassed that in neighboring countries.A mother needs boiled water, sugar and salt from her kitchen to prepare ORT. A simple solution, but the challenge was to reach the millions of mothers, teach them how to prepare the saline solution and ensure the proper feeding of sick children.BRAC employed female health workers from the community to go door to door and teach mothers to prepare and administer ORT. The rural and often illiterate mother would need to remember 7 simple points of ORT. The health workers used to mark their utensils to measure half a liter of water, adding a pinch of salt with the fingertips and a fistful of molasses, a substitute to sugar in villages.“BRACs methodology always focuses on strong monitoring mechanism to measure the progress of any intervention and maintain quality and accountability,” says Sir Abed. BRAC representatives would randomly monitor 10 percent of households. Each health worker received 10 Takas ($.12) per household if the mother could remember the 7 points of ORT accurately.Unfortunately, the first round of monitoring showed a disappointing 6 percent household usage rate. BRAC realized that the health workers themselves did not believe in the intervention. BRAC trained the health workers to show how ORT works. The new found belief in the intervention increased the usage rate to 19%, but still far below making a meaningful impact nationally.Further analysis showed that men felt undermined by not being adequately engaged. BRAC workers started to engage the fathers. To cut time and cost by half, workers started teaching mothers in groups instead of an one on one basis and monitoring the monitors. Meetings were organized in markets, schools and mosques to explain the benefits of ORT. National TV and radio launched a campaign to popularize ORT. Once the whole village was mobilized, the results were remarkable.Sir Abed said, “It involved several incremental steps to deliver the desirable service to the poor. First, making the program effective; second, refining the intervention based on the trial and error to make it efficient; and third, a focus on robust monitoring and accountability mechanism allowing the scaling up of the intervention nationwide.”Citing examples of interlinked development impacts, Sir Abed highlighted that the fertility rate among Bangladeshi women declined during the same period. Bangladesh today has almost achieved a replacement level fertility rate of 2.2 children per women.The experience shows that through efficient delivery, simple local solutions can bring positive changes in the lives of millions. And to do so, we need to identify effective and available avenues of delivery, easy ways of scaling up the initiative, learn from the failures and rectify. We learn, at each stage, vigilant monitoring, impact assessment, and quick redesigns to improve the intervention.The delivery mechanism in ORT initiative reconciles with many projects within the Bank to reach out to the poorest of the society. This experience can be applied to bring services to millions of people worldwide for poverty reduction and human development.“Bangladesh has shown remarkable progress through simple solutions as ORT. These efforts could be replicated as a model in any development project world-wide,” remarked Sir Abed ending his knowledge sharing with staff in the Dhaka office. Show Less -

Ashi Kohli Kathuria and Seenithamby Manoharan described the adventures, trials, and tribulations of integrating nutrition into other sectoral programs. In Bihar, India, Ashi is working with 3 diverse ... Show More +projects at various stages of implementation. One of the issues discussed by attendees was the challenge of getting nutrition into the results framework and at what level if the project is not focused on nutrition --- after all, we do what we measure. Mano described the political economy of bringing together upwards of 8 different stakeholder groups as a multi-sector village nutrition team. This segued perfectly into Ramesh Govindaraj’s presentation on the SAFANSI-funded political economy analysis tool. Ashi Kohli-Kathuria later presented the work on IYCF in India with the Breastfeeding Promotion Network, which financed a series of international and national workshops, developed report cards for each South Asian country based on their policies and programs, and developed the IYCF Financial Planning Tool to estimate the cost of scaling up. Focusing on the community level, the group heard from Biju Rao and his Social Observatory team on their work to integrate community monitoring with ICT for real time monitoring and decision support systems to track nutrition outcomes among other critical factors for poverty reduction.Members of the BEES Network also received a SAFANSI grant to look at women’s roles in food security at the community level. Their work in Bhutan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka identified several knowledge gaps, production and consumption gaps, and the prevalence of some traditions that undermine nutrition. They also identified community managed and enterprise approaches to addressing the nutrition problem. The workshop put a spotlight on the one-dish meal initiative, or Sanjeevi, a community approach that includes a social enterprise developed by Viluthu in Sri Lanka that prepares and sells nutritionally balanced and affordable meals drawing from local agricultural resources. The meals are sold in kiosks largely operated by war widows, the most vulnerable group identified in their gap analysis. During the workshop, the participants were treated to a series of cooking demonstrations featuring one-dish meals from several South Asia countries, which was kicked off by Onno Ruhl, Country Director for India. The concept of one-dish meals is certainly not a panacea for household malnutrition, but it did stimulate conversation about food and how we pursue dietary diversity, or not, in our daily meals. In the rest of the workshop the BEES Network examined the potential for enterprise approaches (particular women-led enterprises) to food and nutrition security. Members from Afghanistan, Nepal, India, and Bangladesh added their experience with food-based enterprises including dairy, food distribution, nutraceuticals, seed production, and poultry, among others. Bringing two disparate networks of teams together led to increased understanding of what we’ve learned, what more we need to learn, and how we can learn from each other. For more information, contact Melissa Williams, Gitanjali Chaturvedi, and Jamie Greenawalt. Show Less -

No differences were found in employment impacts across quarantined and non-quarantined districts, further highlighting the importance of economy-wide indirect effects. Also, the data suggest the... Show More +re has not been recent large scale migration.The Ebola outbreak has not shown a significant effect on the ongoing harvest although the unseasonably heavy rains appear to have delayed the harvest. Food insecurity is high in Sierra Leone, but it is unclear the degree to which this is Ebola-related. There is no current evidence to suggest that quarantine restrictions are preventing food from reaching markets, and food insecurity is not higher in the quarantined districts. The poorest households are the most food insecure and are less likely to have access to informal safety nets through remittances.There is some evidence of a decrease in utilization of health services for non-EVD conditions in Freetown. A much lower proportion of women in the capital reported post-natal clinic visits than in 2013. In the rest of the country, on the other hand, there is little evidence of a decline in usage. Show Less -

Country StudiesPopulation, Family Planning and Reproductive Health Policy Harmonization in BangladeshAdvancing Cervical Cancer Prevention in India: Insights from Research and ProgramsInvolving Men in ... Show More +Reproductive and Fertility Issues : Insights from PunjabCommunity Midwifery Education Program in Afghanistan Knowledge BriefsSouth Asia: Maternal and Reproductive Health at a GlanceAfghanistan: Maternal and Reproductive Health at a GlanceBangladesh: Maternal and Reproductive Health at a GlanceBhutan: Maternal and Reproductive Health at a GlanceIndia: Maternal and Reproductive Health at a GlanceMaldives: Maternal and Reproductive Health at a GlanceNepal: Maternal and Reproductive Health at a GlancePakistan: Maternal and Reproductive Health at a GlanceSri Lanka: Maternal and Reproductive Health at a Glance Community Midwifery Education in AfghanistanHarnessing the Demographic Dividend in BangladeshInvolving Men in Reproductive and Fertility Issues: PunjabJanani Suraksha Yojana - India's Conditional Cash Transfers for Poor Pregnant WomenThe Role of the Private Sector in Reproductive Health in Bangladesh Show Less -

This paper assesses inequality of
opportunity in educational achievement using the Human
Opportunity Index methodology on data from the Programme for
International ... Show More +Student Assessment. The findings suggest that
there are large inequalities in learning outcomes as
measured by demonstrated proficiency in Programme for
International Student Assessment test scores in math,
reading, and science. Differences in wealth, parental
education, and area of residence explain a bulk of this
inequality in most of the countries in the sample.
Consistent with what has been documented previously in the
literature, the paper also finds a strong and stable
correlation between inequality of opportunity and public
spending on school education. An exploration of the changes
in inequality of opportunity between the 2009 and 2012
rounds of the Programme for International Student
Assessment, using parametric and nonparametric techniques,
suggests that there has been little progress. Show Less -

Malnutrition is responsible for nearly
half (45 percent) of all deaths in children under five.
Children who are undernourished between conception and age
two are at... Show More + high risk for impaired cognitive development,
which adversely affects the countrys productivity and
growth. The World Bank is supporting nutrition-related
interventions through multiple projects. For example, the
PNPM Generasi Sehat dan Cerdas (National Program for
Community Empowerment, Healthy and Bright Generation) has
set nutrition-sensitive targets including improving the use
of maternal and child health services and consumption of
Vitamin A for children under five. In 2014, PNPM Generasi is
expected to extend to three more provinces, and to include a
new focus on stunting reduction by providing IYCF (Infant
and Young Child Feeding) training to service providers and
community volunteers to improve their counseling skills. In
the PKH/Program Keluarga Harapan, a conditional cash
transfer is being piloted to focus on improving the health
and education services utilization including prenatal and
postnatal check-ups, professionally attended birth, growth
promotion and monitoring, Vitamin A supplementation, etc. At
the policy level, the World Bank is supporting the Review of
Double Burden of Malnutrition (DBM) in Indonesia to discuss
the magnitude and causes of this emerging problem, and to
improve the capacity and governance to address the DBM in
the country. Show Less -

This paper uses cross-section data for
107 countries to explore the relationship between gender
inequality and economic growth. The paper departs from the
literatur... Show More +e by using a broad measure of gender inequality
that goes well beyond gender inequality in education, which
has been the focus of most studies. Another novelty of the
paper lies in exploring heterogeneity in the growth-gender
inequality relationship. The results confirm that greater
gender inequality is strongly associated with lower economic
growth. However, this negative relationship between gender
inequality and growth is entirely due to the relatively poor
countries, with the relatively rich countries showing no
such relationship. The findings have important implications
for the design and targeting of gender-specific policies. Show Less -

Although resilience has become a popular
concept in studies of poverty and vulnerability, it has been
difficult to obtain a credible measure of resilience. This
dif... Show More +ficulty is because the data required to measure
resilience, which involves observing household outcomes over
time after every exposure to a shock, are usually
unavailable in many contexts. This paper proposes a new
method for measuring household resilience using readily
available cross section data. Intuitively, a household is
considered resilient if there is very little difference
between the pre- and post-shock welfare. By obtaining
counterfactual welfare for households before and after a
shock, households are classified as chronically poor,
non-resilient, and resilient. This method is applied to four
countries in the Sahel. It is found that Niger, Burkina
Faso, and Northern Nigeria have high percentages of
chronically poor: respectively, 48, 34, and 27 percent. In
Senegal, only 4 percent of the population is chronically
poor. The middle group, the non-resilient, accounts for
about 70 percent of the households in Senegal, while in the
other countries it ranges between 34 and 38 percent.
Resilient households account for about 33 percent in all
countries except Niger, where the share is around 18 percent. Show Less -

This study estimates marginal increase
in malnutrition for children ages 1-3 years from exposure to
an extreme shock in the West African Sahel. The study uses
knowl... Show More +edge of a child's birth and high resolution
spatial and temporal distribution of shocks, calculated from
the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index and
satellite-based measures of rainfall and temperature to link
a child to the shock experienced in-utero. The study finds
that while around 20 percent of the children in the sample
are stunted or underweight, more than 30 percent of the
children in the sample are highly vulnerable to either form
of malnutrition. Show Less -